Well would you look at that? It’s midnight EST again and that means the LEFT Launch is starting in Wellington this very minute. Before too many people show up we have one more special deal for you. Today is Sarah Jean Alexander Day! For the next 24 hours, every online purchase of LEFT gets you a free digital download of Wildlives, published by Big Lucks Books.
Today, we Party with the Sad Girl. Keep reading for a good time.
Sarah Jean Alexander is from Baltimore, Maryland. She co-edits Shabby Doll House and used to edit Parlor, which seems to have disappeared from the internet (sob). She likes pickles.
Books & eBooks:
- Wildlives is Sarah Jean’s first full-length book of poetry. You can buy it here, care of our friends Big Lucks Books.
- Share Your Fears With Mine is an ebook of short fiction on Pangur Ban Party
- na-po-wri-mo-pdf is a PDF of poems written for na-po-wri-mo (duh)
- Sarah Jessica Theo Bradley is a collaborative ebook written by Sarah Jean and Theo Thimo
- Goodbye Drinks is 20 poems and 1 guide
- I imagine you in your house, cleaning your chest is Sarah Jean’s first ebook and still some of our favourite work by her
Poems & Things:
- This Is A Countdown on New Wave Vomit
- you are a heavy animal too on Electric Cereal
- Horoscope & Burped in Illuminati Girl Gang Vol. 3
- I’m Sure Of It in Big Lucks #06
- Alone On A Moving Train & Ways In Which It Is True on The Quietus
- People should be required to die while doing the things they do for a living on Potluck Mag
- A List Of My Insecurities on Thought Catalog
- Pressure, Titanium, & Bone on Fanzine
In addition to writing, Sarah Jean does cool things like:
- Predict the Weather for Real Pants
- Interior Decoration for Sorry House
- Booze Art for herself
and
- This old diary for everyone else
A couple of people were lucky enough to talk to Sarah Jean:
- Adam Robinson used his time with her to discuss Parlor and NaPoWriMo.
- Tommy ‘Teebs’ Pico took a different approach, asking about music, advice, and obsessions.
It’s midnight EST on Friday now, the day before our Wellington LEFT launch, which means it’s the start of Edward Mullany Day! For the next 24 hours, every online purchase of LEFT comes with a free PDF of Figures for an Apocalypse, generously provided by Publishing Genius.
Today, we’re delving into the Figures of Mullany. Keep reading to explore the depths.
Books:
- If I Falter at the Gallows, Publishing Genius 2011
- Figures for an Apocalypse, Publishing Genius 2013
- The Three Sunrises, Publishing Genius 2015 (currently on sale!)
Here is a substantial, 15-part extract from The Three Sunrises, on The Collagist
Here is a preface to The Three Sunrises, on Vol. 1 Brooklyn, which sheds some light on the whole red, white, black colour scheme thing he’s got going on
Here on The Millions, Edward writes about trying to read War and Peace, and talking to strangers
Here are some excerpts from the diary of Edward Mullany
Typing the Figures:
- Four poems on New Delta Review
- One story on Noo Journal
- One very old story on Everyday Genius
- Two very short stories on Nailed
- One very long story (for Edward) on New Ohio Review, with audio
Drawing the Figures:
- Rachel & Ben is a weekly comic strip Edward does for Real Pants. Here is a link to the archive (episodes 1-40). There are also a lot of older Rachel & Ben comics on his Tumblr.
- These cartoons in Little River Mag
- These emotional ones in Everyday Genius
Posing the Figures:
- Here is a very old (circa 2009) interview between Gabe Durham and Edward, originally for Keyhole Magazine. It has links to a whole lot of even older stories (and a poem), and some of the links even still work.
- Here is a very much more new interview about The Three Sunrises, on Electric Literature
- Here’s one with Matthew Sherling about being Catholic, and also it includes a poem from If I Falter at the Gallows
- Another quite old one, this time about violence and religion, for Big Other (and this follow up, after his poetry book was published)
- In this one on HTMLGIANT, Adam Robinson throws a few questions his way (& pre-Sunrises Edward speculates about his third book)
- Five questions and a drawing on NANO Fiction
It’s midnight EST on Thursday now in the lead up to our LEFT launch in Wellington, and that means it’s Kimmy Walters Day! For the next 24 hours, every online purchase of LEFT will come with a free download of Uptalk, generously provided by Bottlecap Press.
Today, we are Investigating the Ghost. Keep reading to try & find her.
Let’s start off with 25 facts about Kimmy & Uptalk.
Books & chapbooks:
- Uptalk is Kimmy’s first full-length collection of poems. It is available to purchase here from Bottlecap Press, and it is a beautiful book inside & out.
- Linguistics of Girlhood is an echapbook published on Western Beefs of North America
- Flesh & Blood is a self-published ebook, available on Scribd. The title poem is sick and beautiful.
- Kimmy is working on a second poetry collection, tentatively titled Horselessness
Ghost writings:
- Scoop Girl on Moonsick Magazine
- Tiny Nature on Wu-Wei Fashion Mag
- Three poems on Shabby Doll House
- Two poems in Quarter 03, edited by Carolyn DeCarlo
- Lies, pt. 1 & 2 in Gesture #7
EVP recordings:
- This interview on Dazed about linguistics & Uptalk (and other things, like the colours pink & gold)
- This interview with Sheila Heti about tweets, on The Believer
- This interview about Unsolved Mysteries in Probably Crying Review
Hidden content:
- Kimmy talked about Uptalk influences (incl. Whitney Houston, Heather Christle, & “The Boys”) in the June Shabby Doll Reader, which you can & should subscribe to here (the We Are Babies household does, FYI).
- Kimmy writes a lot of incredible things on Twitter at @arealliveghost. Many of them are tiny poems. Some were arranged by Russel Swensen into new poems here for Frigg Magazine. Kimmy wrote a note about the process, which you can read at the bottom of that page.
- Kimmy has also arranged @horse_ebooks tweets into poems. Many of these appeared on Slacktory. Here is the first and here is a link to a bunch of them.
Midnight EST has come again, now on the Wednesday before Wellington’s LEFT launch, and that means it’s M Kitchell Day! For the next 24 hours, every online purchase of LEFT is tethered to a free digital download of Throw Yourself Out and See If It Makes Me Come, published by Void Editions (and now out of print).
Today, we will be Cataloguing the Prolific. Keep reading to immerse fully.
M Kitchell has self-published no less than 34 books & chapbooks. He runs the press Solar Luxuriance. He is a designer, artist, cinephile, musician. His dulcet tones are a thing of beauty.
Books:
- Spiritual Instrument is a full-length collection from Civil Coping Mechanisms
- Apart From is a myth & a mixed media collection, with an accompanying soundtrack, from Solar Luxuriance
- Slow Slidings, Blue Square Press (Out of Print)
- Variations on the Sun, Love Symbol Press (Out of Print)
Writing online:
- A story in PANK
- A list on Everyday Genius
- Twelve dreams in Plinth
- A poem in Finery
- A story in the Fanzine
Interviews & other views:
- Queerness & discussion of Spiritual Animal and Apart From, on the Fanzine
- A very in-depth look at being a small press, on Entropy
- On cinephilia & his book Slow Slidings, in conversation with Blake Butler, at Vice
- About his story “Loop”, in/on PANK
Some other internet glitches/glimpses:
- This mixtape, (Don’t) Shampoo Your Hair in the 1900s, a potential B-side to Tim Jones-Yelvington’s mix, for Artifice Books
- His YouTube channel, including video readings & book trailers by M Kitchell and others
- His Goodreads page, where he posts a lot of in-depth, high-quality reviews (much better than most Goodreads pages)
- His Tumblr blog, where he reblogs some really weird shit
- The archive of LIES/ISLE, the now-defunct online lit mag he once edited
It’s midnight EST on the Tuesday before the Wellington launch of LEFT, which means we can now announce that today is Cassandra Gillig Day! For the next 24 hours, every online purchase of LEFT will be accompanied by a free digital download of desperate living, published by Perfect Lovers Press.
Today, we will be Archiving the Archivist. Keep reading to discover more.
Cassandra is a writer & an archivist. She is translating a book of poems by the Venezuelan poet Miyo Vestrini & editing a collection of Hannah Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journals. She helps out with several small presses, including Boost House, Tender Buttons, and Big Lucks.
Books / Albums feat. Cassandra:
- If you want to buy a copy of desperate living, it is available here. Part of the PLP Xerox Series 008, it is a limited edition of 100.
- She & Anne Boyer translated Matters to No One: Some Poems of Miyo Vestrini, from The New Order of St Agatha
- She has a track on Black Cake’s Year One // Anthology, which is a remix of The artt (a poem in Dusie 15)
- She had her own album, Sex Beach (Black Cake 2014), but that maybe isn’t available any more
- put me in charge of poetry magazine is an album of mash-ups Cassandra made between poets and pop/hip-hop beats
- She has a set of John Ashbery mash-ups on The Home School
Cassandra as archivist:
- Her YouTube channel, where she’s uploaded numerous poets reading their poems
- She has all the SPD facts, and shares them in a top 10 list
- On Safety Pin Review, where she acts as both contributor and operative
- On Vouched Books, talking about Greying Ghost’s archiving of Corduroy Mountain
- This introduction to The New Order of St Agatha
- Singing for Alice Notley, at Alette in Oakland: A Symposium on the Work of Alice Notley, below:
Cassandra as writer:
- The best fruit and nuts, a Powerpoint presentation
- A story in Illuminati Girl Gang Vol. 1
- A short play in Have U Seen My Whale
- A story in Shabby Doll House
- A poetic excerpt in Quarter 01
- In Bone Bouquet Issue 4.2, available to purchase here
Interviews with Cassandra:
- On Dorothea Lasky’s column, Five Questions Five Answers, for the LA Review of Books
- On Entropy, revealing that Vin Diesel singing Rihanna’s ‘Stay’ makes her want to write poetry
It’s midnight EST on the Monday before the LEFT launch in Wellington & you know what that means: it’s Bob Schofield Day! For the next 24 hrs, every online purchase of LEFT comes with a free digital download of Moon Facts, published by Nostrovia Poetry.
What better way to celebrate than to collect a whole lot of Bob Facts? Keep reading to find them all.
Featured Books:
- Moon Facts (free PDF today with every purchase of LEFT, or buy it from Nostrovia here)
- The Inevitable June (buy it from tNY here)
- Man Bites Cloud (part of a Publishing Genius ebook flight, buy it here)
- Miniature Couples, with Katherine Osborne
- The Last Days of Tokyo (Bob’s first book)
Some of Bob’s work online:
- A poem in The Bohemyth
- A poem in Little River
- An illustration in Everyday Genius
- Three poems & an illustration in UP Literature
- A prose piece in Shabby Doll House
Interviews & some of Bob’s ideas:
- A discussion of The Inevitable June & his cartoon style on Biblioklept
- Talking about the connection between illustration & writing for Man Bites Cloud on Publishing Genius
- Talking about cocktail parties & how he doesn’t attend them on Fanzine
A few other things Bob does around the internet:
- Bob’s Bottomless Pit of Good Advice, an illustrated advice column for The Eeel
- Submit poems to Bob and he will draw them & post them to his blog
- He wrote some strange things for Medium
- An essay in Bright Wall/Dark Room (preview here)
Check the full catalogue of Bob’s work on his website, or focus in on his writing or drawing.
So many of the contributors to LEFT have books all of their own and for the week leading up to the launch we’re giving you the chance to check them out :)
The days might get a little confusing with different timezones and what not so make sure you note in your order which book you want the pdf of <3
This week has been pretty nuts in terms of my trying to master time travel in order to get all the assignments done. But what made it okay, including my excellent friends-people-family, was getting a copy of this pretty. Here is a book I am in! One of my fairy tales has found a print home. I am so happy, so grateful. And if you would like to buy a book full of words and pictures I highly recommend you check out LEFT.
2 - Contributor Carolyn DeCarlo and We Are Babies co-publisher writes:
22 copies of LEFT have made the trip up to Auckland with us !!!!!
3 - Nanna Juul Lanng is reading LEFT on a train.
4 - Clare Arnot says:
This beautiful book just arrived at my house. What struck me most was how much space and thought has been given to each writer. You've treated them with a lot of love. You guys should be super proud. Also, my cat likes it. Though to be fair she's not actually my cat, and she's probably only pretending to read it.
Send us your photos with LEFT and I’ll post them here :)
Did you know that LEFT has been available for preorder for two whole weeks now?
That means there’s only two weeks left (hehe) get it at the discounted price!
Also, thanks to the help of Adam Robinson of Publishing Genius, shipping to the US just got a lot cheaper =D
If you’re at all interested in the project I really encourage you to preorder it. It’s my favourite thing I’ve ever made and the more preorders I get, the more copies I can afford to print, the more widely I can distribute it, the more beauty there will be in the world.
At the moment I’m working as hard as I can to get reviews and other coverage in cool places. Like the Shabby Doll House Reader:
I have a few more cool things lined up that I’ll be able to show you soon but if you have any ideas for other ways to promote LEFT please get in touch with me at [email protected]
You recently completed your MFA at Notre Dame. What was that experience like? How was it working with Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Goransson? Will you continue to work with Action books now that you've graduated?
I loved it. I was already a huge fan of Johannes and Joyelle’s writing, so Notre Dame was pretty much the perfect situation for me. Joyelle’s energy is infectious and she got me thinking about form and formlessness in ways I hadn’t prior to the two years I spent completing my MFA. She’s always open to whatever you’re interested in writing about. If you turned in a poem that was also printed on a dried leaf stamped with hashtags and a handwritten equation related to the development of a spacecraft propulsion device, she would have feedback for you. And it would be good feedback. You would go into her office asking for a book recommendation and you would leave her office with a list of book recommendations and probably more notes for your manuscript-in-progress. Same thing goes for Johannes. I would turn in some work and he would ask, “Have you read [ ]” or “What about [ ]. No? You should read that.” It was two very beneficial years that I definitely don’t regret. And I did an obscene amount of reading while I was there, too. Plus, I’d always tinkered around with Swedish, but I don’t think I would have ever begun taking translation seriously if it wasn’t for Johannes’s encouragement. And I mean ‘seriously’ in the sense that it was something that I could do. I know a lot of writers have this bizarre theory that translating poetry or fiction is somehow lesser than strictly producing writing of their own. I just can’t relate to that. I just kind of want to engage with as many languages as possible. Like writers like Christian Hawkey and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs. Johannes was the first instructor I’d ever had that was like, ‘You should translate. You should work with the language more. Practice your translation. Read more about translation.’ Up until that point, a lot of my former instructors had only said things like, ‘Why Swedish? That doesn’t seem practical’ or ‘Have you ever been to Sweden? No? Then you probably shouldn’t be trying to translate Swedish.’ I swear the favorite pastime of humans in America has something to do with the obliteration of ambition. And each other. The word itself (“ambition”) is frequently treated as some sort of negative quality within academia. ‘I don’t know about this project, it seems rather ambitious.’ ‘You know what the problem with this paper is? It’s just too ambitious.’ It just pisses me off. Let your students be ambitious! My experience with translation has turned out really well. It gives me an opportunity to feel productive all the time. If I have writer’s block, I can translate. If translation isn’t going well, I can try writing something of my own. Translating usually gives me a ton of ideas about what the mechanics of my own language and writing are/aren’t doing. Additionally, my MFA thesis, The House of the Tree of Sores, actually ended up being written in a combination of Swedish and English. How many MFA programs would let something like that fly? From the stories I’ve heard, I’d guess not too many.
I can’t officially continue working for Action Books, no. My name will eventually disappear from the masthead. But that doesn’t mean I can’t remain a friend to Action Books!
Even though you can’t work for Action Books anymore, you’re still running Radioactive Moat and editing at Fanzine. I’d be interested to hear a bit your work on each of these publications and your philosophy on publishing in general.
Radioactive Moat has its own bi-annually published lit mag called Deluge and issue five will drop some time this fall. Eventually I would really like to publish and distribute full-length books of poetry via Radioactive Moat, but I’m currently focusing most of my energy on a job search. But, yeah, the goal of Radioactive Moat has always been to share work from both emerging and established writers. It’s a publication that celebrates radioactivity—a type of energy I grew up around in the green slime-saturated 90s. Radioactivity has been associated with elements of mutation for as long as I can remember. Radioactivity is grotesque! Is freakish! Is atypical! Is queer! Is pro-translation! Is tangled up in nature! Is a threat to the status quo! And that’s the kind of writing I’ve been sharing with readers since 2009. Radioactive Moat has been a longtime zone of corrosive flourishes! And I continue to read submissions for Deluge year-round.
Working for Fanzine has also been great. Most of all because I have the freedom to review, interview, or solicit artists of my choosing. I especially like being associated with a publication that thinks things like poetry—and even poetry-in-translation—deserve to be mentioned alongside articles on popular musicians and sports in particular. Growing up, I always noticed a hostile divide between kids who liked sports and kids who liked art. Athletic students typically thought that the students who liked art were “faggots” or something and artistic students frequently dismissed athletic students as brainless. I think what makes so many shitty parents so shitty is the fact that they devote so much time to reinforcing problematic gender norms instead of just being like, ‘Hey, you can actually do both of these things.’ I’ve met a number of successful (and unsuccessful) athletes who were also very capable of creating interesting art. Unfortunately they were painstakingly conditioned to negate their artistic qualities. They were taught to censor an important part of themselves. Probably because it wasn’t considered “manly” or “necessary” or something. So I tend to champion anything that reminds readers that art and performance can have a wider audience.
Although you've been publishing online for years, your first physical chapbook, GOAL/TENDER MEAT/TENDER has only just come out. Why did it take you so long to have something published in print and what has the process of creating this book been like?
It’s probably because I never really submit to chapbook competitions. I’m always writing with larger page counts in mind. I can’t just write one smallish series of poems. I plan things out. I map things out. For GOAL/TENDER MEAT/TENDER, I drew a lot. Sketched out what I thought the hockey uniforms might look like. Did some painting. Chapbook-sized manuscripts tend to be 15-30 pages, I think. I can’t do that. It’s too difficult for me. I can’t sit down knowing I’ll have to stop at 15 or 30. I just have to write until the initial idea or theme feels exhausted or possibly finished.
GOAL/TENDER MEAT/TENDER is actually a lyrical five act radio play, so what I sent horse less press was pretty much the second act of the full-length version of GOAL/TENDER MEAT/TENDER and it turns out they liked it. It was something that was part of something larger, but also self-contained and cohesive in its own way. So it worked out this time. Chapbooks are a cool idea because it’s something handmade. Bookbinding is its own medium in a way. I think people take that for granted. I also thought it would be really cool if my chapbook could look like a goaltender mask and the horse less press team made that happen! I really like the idea of a book cover being a mask. It makes it stop being a book cover.
GOAL/TENDER MEAT/TENDER utilizes the language of hockey to communicate the cannibalistic mating habits of the female praying mantis. The merging of insect language and locker room language and slap shots and sweat and blood and tears—I think it all results in something rather violent and kind of gay. Like most popular sports. (Makes an ass-slapping gesture.)
The poems of yours in LEFT are excerpted from a manuscript titled One Hundred Acres. What's happening with that project at the moment. Have you been shopping it around? Do you have any other projects on the go?
One Hundred Acres started as a sort of joke between me and Feng Sun Chen. I’ve always been fond of the Tardigrade (aka the “waterbear” or “moss piglet”). And me and Feng were discussing it on FB chat one day and I made a comment that was something along the lines of, ‘What if David Lynch did a Winnie the Pooh movie?’ I thought the Tardigrade was what Winnie the Pooh might look like if pushed to that extreme. Feng and I joked about co-writing our own Lynchian Winnie the Pooh adventures, but it never happened. But one day, I was incredibly bored and I was thinking about the ways Mike Kelley thinks about stuffed animals and decided that the Winnie the Pooh thing needed to happen. The Winnie the Pooh character became Who-Bear, a stuffed animal that wants to know what gender it is. Piglet became Cutlet, a puppet-like talking slab of meat with leaky orifices. Eeyore became Eyesore, a plush donkey addicted to anti-depressants. Tigger became Tyga Tyga, a stuffed tiger with Blakean qualities. Kanga and Roo became Skank-a-Roo, a tortured reality TV celebrity. Rabbit became Oxy Cotton, a sort of traitor to the other stuffed animal characters. And the child characters are just like these evil things that hate and torture stuffed animals and spend all their time playing with electronic gadgets. The only thing that’s changed about the manuscript is that many of the poems have been re-formatted as lyric poems. The tone, however, is still very Mike Kelley. Very Lee Edelman. Very Disney.
I haven’t really been shopping it around, no. However, I would send it to someone if they were interested. Poems from One Hundred Acres have appeared in LIT, Heavy Feather Review: Vacancies, Smoking Glue Gun, and now, LEFT—which looks incredible, by the way!
Currently, I’m trying to finish up an anthropogenically-minded collection of poems called Aristolachia: After Tech Lust. I think of “tech lust” as the era that humans are currently dying in. It’s a series of poems that happen during and after the Internet. The poems eventually follow an ailing human remnant’s interactions with a new species of tech-infected plant life. Think: Huysmans’s Against Nature meets Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man.
So far in this interview you’ve mentioned four full length manuscripts you’ve either written or are currently working on. That seems like a lot to me. How did you manage it? Were you working on them all at the same time? What’s your process like? Is there something specific you’re trying to achieve across all of your work?
Well, I don’t watch television. I don’t own a television. And I haven’t purchased a video game console since PS2. You could say that is my process. I mean, I’m not saying all TV is bad. I’m also not saying video games are crap because I think when it comes to artistic merit, video games are too easily dismissed. But I think those things can be toxic for writers. Video games . . . maybe less so. I think the free terrain and sprawling environments of video games can be idea-generators for poems, fiction, etc. But if I always had television and video games at my disposal, they would likely take up a lot of the time I could be spending on my writing. I binge-write the way people binge-watch a television series on Netflix. I’ll devote six to eight hours a day to writing. And, yeah, I tend to work on multiple projects at one time. For me, writer’s block becomes less of an obstacle when I know I have several things that I could be working on. Add translation to the mix and it gets really difficult to somehow not be doing something productive. I’ve also voluntarily prevented myself from upgrading to a smartphone device of whatever kind to avoid unnecessary distractions. (Though sometimes I do get curious about what I’m missing out on.) I know I’ll eventually be forced to give up my phone with the slide-out keypad and ‘upgrade’ to something that constantly monitors my consumption and my location and my conversations with friends. But, for right now, no. Just, no. I don’t need to have the internet in my pocket at all times. I don’t need the distractions. I don’t need to know which downloadable applications are currently trending. I don’t know what Snap Chat really does. I do know that many of our electronic devices—our smartphones and our pads and our tablets and our touchscreens—are made using cerium. I know that there is a nightmarishly toxic lake in Baotou of Inner Mongolia that is actually the result of cerium oxide production. I know that as long as my body inhabits a ‘technologically innovative’ America, I am most likely always inadvertently exploiting another human body somewhere else in the world just to ‘stay connected’ when I check out the goings on of my ‘news feed.’ What else can I do but try and communicate my frustration by writing? I guess that is what I’m trying to achieve, to maybe get at your last question. Life is really brief, but it appears human beings still do whatever they can to cause one another pain. I choose to write about the violence in this world because I think too many human beings are numb to it. Absolutely ignorant to it. Perhaps my drive to make the most of my present-tenseness on this planet can be seen in my desire to wrestle with the boundaries of human language (The House of the Tree of Sores), to meditate on the sexual behavior of insects (GOAL/TENDER MEAT/TENDER), to acknowledge the anthropocene as an important point of view (Aristolachia: After Tech Lust). I know it clearly sounds like I don’t lust after more technology. But I do. I’m a hypocrite. I prefer more points of view. I want American literature to be infected by more translations. I want the traditional canon to experience more disruptions. A conversation that includes more voices rather than fewer. That is my preference. Yet it is innovations in technology that have made more perspectives possible. Persons who have been previously silenced have a platform now because of the internet. Baudrillard makes less and less sense to me with each passing day. The threats and the sexual harassment and the racism that persons experience while they are using the internet is just as ‘real’ as anything else. The problem is not our technology, but the means by which our technology arrives to us. Technology simultaneously repulses and reassures me. Humankind is a remarkable dilemma. And poetry is the only way I know how to respond to it.
Do you have any 'career' or life plans moving forward from the MFA? Are you interested in teaching? More work in publishing? Or are you gonna go in an entirely different direction?
I would like to teach creative writing. But it’s an incredibly challenging time to want to do something like that. The arts are constantly being deemphasized in this country. Hell, education itself is constantly being deemphasized in America! But I guess we have men like Tom Corbett and Bobby Jindal to thank for that . . .
That’s a picture of me with the only copy of LEFT in the world.
Come August there will a lot more copies.
LEFT is now available to preorder from www.wearebabies.net
Dalton is a supercute mountain, hovering above the ocean. Check out this conversation I had with him:
Congratulations on the success of Fake Knife and Tandem! That's two chapbooks in one year, as well as a seemingly constant stream of publications in journals. How are you so prolific? What's your writing routine/process like?
Thank you! Yeah, it's all really exciting, & I didn't expect for these two things to happen so close to each other! Those books came from two very different spaces of my head / heart / fog, so it's really interesting to see them happening at the same time.
I write everyday. I decided in my last year of college that, for me, personally, to take poetry seriously, I would have to treat it like a job. A fun job! A therapeutic job! But a job that requires hard, necessary work. & I stick to that. I write something every day. Usually it's a full poem, that I can later return to an edit as I need to before sending out. But when I'm not able to immediately sit down & write, I either write down scraps of thoughts / dreams / shapes into my phone, or I tweet. I use my Twitter as an extension of my writing. I tweet when I'm anxious a lot, & it's nice to just shoot a thought out there into the world & know that within seconds it will be buried by any number of other folks' thoughts. That's really comforting to me. So sometimes I'll return to things I've tweeted about & see if there is a poem in that immediate image. But yeah, I write something everyday. & my routine is so in place that I get begin to get anxious if I don't put something down. I need it.
What led to you making that decision to treat poetry like a job?
I simply decided to treat poetry as a job after hearing my friend Anis, whose poetry I love & am in such gratitude for, talk about treating poetry like a job. Poetry is something I have to show up for every day, whether I am too tired or just don't feel like it, or even if nothing good comes out. I still put that time in.
What was your process for these two books? Did you write them all in one go or over an extended period? Were you working on other things at the same time or were you focused completely on a single project?
With Fake Knife, I pretty much focused on those poems until they were all done. I was just so fueled from seeing St. Vincent live, that concert was pretty much all I could think about. Those poems were a several-week processing of a very visceral experience, & it was hard to focus on anything else. THANKS A LOT, ANNIE CLARK.
As for TANDEM, those poems were a little more scattered. I'd write an image down, & then get to the poem a few days later. I wrote these poems before & after Fake Knife, & I worked on a lot of other poems at the same time as these.
It's cool to hear that the process for TANDEM was scattered, seeing as the poems are literally scattered across the pages.
I'm interested in how you came to poetry. How did you find it (or it find you)?
A friend sent me a video of my future-friend Anis Mojgani performing his poem "Shake the Dust" about three or four years ago in college, & it was so gentle & different & possible, it was all uphill from there. I started writing poems all the time as I started reading books published by Write Bloody, & that's how I got to know Jeremy Radin, who is my main uncrumbling love, & then I stumbled into Shira Erlichman & Zachary Schomburg & Sara Woods & John Mortara & Angel Nafis & Heather Christle & Emily Kendal Frey & Danez Smith & ON & ON & ON forever. & I haven't stopped reading or writing since.
How do you think your reading affects your writing? What do you take from the poems you read and how is it transformed by passing through you?
Reading a good poem alters the blueprint of me. I have no way of knowing how I'm changed, only that something has shifted. & so, I read all the time. & so, I'm a perpetually morphing body. When I look in the mirror, it's just a little pretty blur. I'm comfortable in that blur. I love speaking what that blur has to say at any given moment. So, I keep reading.
Do you have any other projects coming out soon? And where do you see your poetry going/taking you in the future? Do you have any goals? Dreams? Fantasies?
I have a few projects coming out soon!
1. A collection of short / weirdo / poem / micro / macro pieces, entitled Interglacials, will be published by tNY.press, hopefully sometimes around August. This will be an ebook, fully illustrated, & affordable, & I really think folks will dig it.
2. A chapbook of poems, Too Breathe I'm Too Thin, will be published by Hyacinth Girl Press sometime in 2016 & I'm very proud of these poems yes yes yes!
3. [TOP SECRET PROJECT, BEING PUBLISHED SOON, DETAILS FORTHCOMING]
4. Fake Knife is going into its second printing!
As for the future, I'm working on a book of one-act play poems, & it's taking me places I'd never gone before, both as a writer & a body. I'm looking at things like grief & love & a n x i e t y, from so many different ways, & I'm excited to keep working on it.
I'm also working on a collection of short pieces, all featuring Aubrey Plaza. I'm really digging them, because they are the most "prose-ish" things I've written, & Aubrey Plaza is the hero of all my darkness.
& beyond that, I'm starting my MFA in the Fall, & so I'm sure so many more things will hatch for me there, but who knows? Not me. Not you, either. Maybe this bug outside my window does. I just looked this bug up. It's a hummingbird moth. & I feel pretty certain now that it knows, well, something.
berated myself for not being mysterious for not using mystery for breaking my heart all by myself with my laying out everything on the tableness. went to the supermarket, bought a tub of icecream and big frozen bag of paella. made some mysterious pictures and it felt right to hold back just as much as i gave out.
this is 1 of the mysterious pictures i made today:
except it would have been more mysterious if i hadn't shown you.
What did you do today?
today i started vaping :D this is fantastic cuz i've been chainsmokin for 20 years - hela sez that's 'dank as fuk' - but i dont want dank lungs.
What did you do today?
worked on a new collab w brad phillips, looked through subs for MACRO with michael hessel-mial, watched Peaky Blinders with bibi, went to bed with The First Bad Man by miranda july - i don't like it... the only books i can read lately without getting annoyed or bored are Cunny by bunny rogers, The Andy Warhol Diaries, Autoportrait by edouard leve. Vaped hard all day - can even vape in bed - realised 1 is not enuf.
What did you do today?
spent all weekend covering my grubby livingroom walls with pages from magazines. doing 3 walls in white/text and 1 wall in dramatic b&w. i've only just started on that bit - as u can see :))
the ceiling is filthy too, but i daren't touch it cuz there's an ominous crack - it hasn't shown up in this pic, but it is huge, and runs from one side of the room to the other.
What did you do today?
i wrote the answer to this question, then i cut it up, then i tumblrd it, then i macro'd it, then i tweted it, then i fb'd it then i deleted it, then i emailed it you.
What did you do today?
Today i wrote about tommy shelby - a character in the BBC drama Peaky Blinders. I imagined I had reached a stage where i could never feel a ridiculously mind-bending fascination-crush ever again, but oh how wrong i was. and the costumes etc are great, like they've taken the trad short back n sides haircut to punkish extremes. Season 2, episode 1 opens with two widows, veils down, marchin side by side, pushing 2 black silver cross prams - i nearly died n went to TV heaven, it is 100% swoonish.
13 golden clitorises at the end of my gun
dear tommy, i dont like the penis but i might make an exception 4 u.
ur brutal 21stC haircut makes me wanna be you.
i will be you and you will be you and we will be ourselves.
What did you do today?
today is my birthday. spent all afternoon thinking how defunct n dull bios are. we had curries and intense chocolate - my fav foods. we watched the new kurt cobain doc, Montage of heck, it was hilariously disappointing. and c love is irritatingly full of herself.
I’m doing interviews with some of the contributors so that you can get to know them a bit better before LEFT comes out. Here’s the first one, with the sixth and only Bob Schofield (whose initials are, charmingly, BS):
LEFT: Who?
Bob Schofield: Bob Schofield is me, some internet guy who writes things and draws pictures and makes comics.
L: What?
BS: Like 90% human, 5% ghost, 5% baby wolfman. Wants to make a tiny world that doesn't exist just like Willy Wonka and then slip it in your locker with a folded up note that's just two boxes "yes" or "no".
L: When?
BS: March 28, 1987. starting to feel like an old man on the internet.
L: Where?
BS: Mostly: New Orleans, Louisiana. Currently: Baltimore, Maryland. Inevitably: Somewhere on the moon or Mars or up a really big tree.
L: Why?
BS: Because this is the only thing I’m good at. Because play is just another form of learning. Because I think words and pictures are the blessed goo that holds the world together. Because to me, imagination is holy. Because I believe innovation starts there, progress starts there, empathy starts there. Because I think everything is just a daydream until you step into it. Because in my eyes, you have to visualize that more perfect world before you or anyone else can make it so. Because it feels good to solve problems, even small ones involving an oxford comma. Because I believe that living in service of something other than yourself is vital, and that when you focus deeply on the process of doing your special something, you can lose yourself in it, and the world around you becomes quiet and calm and a little more manageable. You find yourself suddenly and momentarily fulfilled. And I think that’s just about the best feeling there is.
tangentwithtanner
gummygunk
prguitarman
areudirty
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
pixelskylines
stormborns
vaporwave
